For an annual chocolate festival in which all the chocolate entries would be judged and then auctioned off for charity, I decided to build the "Titanic" heading towards a head of (iceberg) lettuce (I have a weakness for wordplay). At first I was going to make the ship out of dark, milk, and white chocolate over cake. However, the structural problems seemed overwhelming, so I opted to build the ship from cardboard and load it with brownies, naming the whole thing, "The Unsinkable Molly Brownies." (It was already based on one bad pun, so why not two?) A friend suggested making it "The Unsinkable Marbled Brownies," and so the project was launched.

The main constraints were time (construction began 10 days before the festival and I had only spare time available) and size (the ship had to contain a decent amount of brownies for the person buying it in the auction but had to be reasonably portable, too). I decided to build only the front end of the ship, back to just in front of the 2nd funnel.

To get the dimensions as accurate as possible, I used photos of other models and plans from the TRMA site, then drew up my own plans, working to roughly 1:175 scale and sacrificing some authenticity in order to satisfy the constraints of time and size. I used a sheet of dark blue foamboard for the ocean base and a sheet of black cardstock for the hull plating. The rest of the ship was built from various grades of scrap cardboard or cardstock, except for the mast, which is bamboo.